Why?

Imagine being able to connect wirelessly to broadband internet, telephony and other online services from wherever you happen to be in the city. From Lakeside in the north to Grenoble Road in the south, from Sandhills Primary School in the east to the Seacourt Park and Ride in the west and all points in between*. All for one low daily, weekly or annual subscription. You could use a laptop, a personal digital assistant, a wireless internet telephone, perhaps even subscription television services.

For businesses and service providers, imagine your field employees being able to get access to your systems from wherever they are working, out on a job somewhere, in meetings with clients, anywhere. Or perhaps you want to link to monitoring devices cheaply and quickly with no wired setup to arrange - such as a health care provider wanting to put equipment into a patient's home to alert central clinical staff instantly to changes in the patient's condition. Maybe you are a security company wanting to link in multiple alarm or call out systems. Or perhaps a utility wanting to take meter readings remotely. Even a bus company wanting to put interactive displays at bus stops.

We are now completely immersed in all pervasive information, whether we are learning, shopping, being entertained, or just waiting for a bus, but we always seem to be in the wrong place to access it. Maybe even some areas do not have the ability to access it at all. Whilst providing the infrastructure to deliver this information has been seen up till now as a commercial, market driven activity, we actually believe that this is a "civic" function, just as access to good roads, electricity supplies and sewage systems has been in the past.

If all our citizens and all our businesses that play a vital role in our local economy are to compete on favourable terms, we cannot wait till the big telecoms giants decide it's worth investing in a particular area. If we are able to provide the infrastructure, innovations that make use of it will follow.

We believe that as well as opening up new ways of operating for businesses that may be able to use remote access, having a socially owned, citizen responsive, low cost ICT infrastructure could significantly reduce the costs of doing business compared with now, where you might have different contracts for phones, mobile phones, wireless devices and computer connections. This potential cost saving is key to our business model. If we can persuade the largest ICT users in the city of the benefits, we hope they may be willing to pre-fund some of the replacement system that they will then benefit from on an "invest to save" basis.

* There's no reason why the network can't reach further - an obvious example being into the Vale of White Horse area to the west of the city at Botley/Cumnor. At the moment we aim for coverage over the city's contiguous built up area, but additional "hops" to more remote locations are certainly a longer term prospect